Bansal said that the way India skipped landline and got into wireless telecom, it is also skipping a lot of offline retail build up that happened in the west.ET Bureau | Updated: October 03, 2016, 11:27 IST

Economic Times: If it is not infrastructure, if it is not steel, if it is not refineries, we are going to see more investment happening in e-commerce perhaps? More investment happening in digital with payment banks expanding and e-commerce companies expanding. Could you comment on that?

Sachin Bansal: Digitisation of the economy is happening at a very fast rate especially with the new government coming in. They have accelerated the pace at which internet growth was happening and internet is also changing. It is becoming wireless instead of the traditional internet of broadband. It is also becoming something different and smart phones led combined with the ability to crunch data at a very large scale and store data in a very cheap manner, This is creating a new paradigm which was never thought of before and India is stepping into that new paradigm straightaway rather than getting into something old and then shifting step by step.

We are skipping a lot of the stuff. The way we skipped the whole landline and got into wireless telecom, we feel that we are also skipping a lot of offline retail build up that happened in the western countries and moving straight to e-commerce and shopping online. And I think that is going to bring new efficiencies and the best thing for us is that we do not have to replace anything. We do not have anything to replace. We are kind of creating the whole thing from scratch which means that we can actually create something which is much more efficient.

It is the same with payments. We are seeing that we skipping a lot of things that happened in other countries and we are moving from cash straight away to mobile banking where mobile phone becomes your credit card.

Economic Times: So what kind of efficiencies do you think you will see when you move more and more from cash to digital to mobile banking and where the smart phone basically becomes your universe? What do you think will be the changes that will impact the economy?

Sachin Bansal: Consumption should go up in the economy because now it will be much easier to consume as compared to before. Earlier, even if you had the money to buy something, it was not accessible whether it is a service or a product Everything is much more accessible now.

Overtime the technology will become so simple that even somebody who is not literate should be able to use it and literacy should not become a bottleneck. That is going to increase the speed of consumption and from an efficiency point of view, our logistics infrastructure is highly inefficient in the country right now. Using mobile phones and internet as well as GPS, etc, we are creating a completely new way of doing logistics with sensors present everywhere. So that is the model that we are going into and it will be significantly different.

Economic Times: You have been an entrepreneur for close to two decades. What are the changes that you are seeing now in the situation when you want to set up a business, when you actually want to scale up and when you want to raise money, how different are things today than what they were probably five-six years ago?

Vijay Shekhar Sharma: First of all, the social fabric changed as far as last few years are concerned. When in 2000-2001 I started PayTM, my parents were comfortable that I am not taking a job because this was sort of social stigma that instead of being a businessmen you should do a good job, a well paying MNC job if you will.

Similarly, if you went to campus for talent, the colleges would be the last in the food chain and you would get those who have got rejected or not selected by others and today if we go in a campus we sort of have a roofer on a talent. I mean we can say that we are giving a good opportunity and chances are that there is tremendous amount of interest.

As far as system is concerned, the government is concerned, this government for the first time treated start up as a sector, digital as intent. I think what I find surprising is that earlier I used to have a little bit of uncomfort talking to a person in government and explaining what we are doing because they didn’t have much clue about the digital world. So they had lot of apprehension and understanding the depth of it and today they are consumers, they are customers, they are understanding and they are reading around all the places so they have a lot more positivity around it. So earlier, if you were not a corporate citizen of grade A, now today you are prince in a grade A sense and that is the change.

Economic Times: You are in a business where you invest and you are at the cutting edge of the consumption and the technology change that is happening. Can I ask you to pick up on Vijay’s thread about the changes that you are seeing now in the start up world and also in the consumption sector?

Satyan Gajwani: I think we start with a macro perspective on the user base and I think what Sachin and Vijay would agree to is that the last three years have shown an exponential growth in usage versus the last 10 years before that and that is what materially changed things.

At the same time in the last few years, smart phones are available for sub $100, Rs 5000 price points which is a critical threshold for mass adoption of smart phones. Between the growth of data penetration thanks to our telecom operators and the reduction in price of smart phones across all of our media properties whether it be our news properties like TOI or music like Gaana, Cricbuzz, mobile growth has dramatically outpaced everything else.

Now, that is a nice thing to see on paper but what is more interesting is that it is more commonplace with everyone around us. There was always that general sense of cynicism towards digital businesses. Today we hear about the growth and values and investments that have happened that sometime shows up. There is something real there. It is very clear now that there is massive consumption of smart phones and there are major changes in consumer habits.

The Times Internet reaches about 100-150 million users on a monthly basis, about 150 million which is now about 8x what the Times Group Newspapers reach. Now that would not have been true five years ago and so from our perspective, we see digital as an opportunity to expand our touch points with consumers across multiple segments not just media and entertainment but things like personal finance and other categories where we feel there is a lot of disruption available.